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Angry Young Men, various British novelists and playwrights who emerged in the 1950s and expressed scorn and disaffection with the established sociopolitical order of their country. Their impatience and resentment were especially aroused by what they perceived as the hypocrisy and mediocrity of the upper and middle classes.
The Angry Young Men were a new breed of intellectuals who were mostly of working class or of lower middle-class origin. Some had been educated at the postwar red-brick universities at the state’s expense, though a few were from Oxford. They shared an outspoken irreverence for the British class system, its traditional network of pedigreed families, and the elitist Oxford and Cambridge universities. They showed an equally uninhibited disdain for the drabness of the postwar welfare state, and their writings frequently expressed raw anger and frustration as the postwar reforms failed to meet exalted aspirations for genuine change.
The trend that was evident in John Wain’s novel Hurry on Down (1953) and in Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis was crystallized in 1956 in the play Look Back in Anger, which became the representative work of the movement. When the Royal Court Theatre’s press agent described the play’s 26-year-old author John Osborne as an “angry young man,” the name was extended to all his contemporaries who expressed rage at the persistence of class distinctions, pride in their lower-class mannerisms, and dislike for anything highbrow or “phoney.” When Sir Laurence Olivier played the leading role in Osborne’s second play, The Entertainer (1957), the Angry Young Men were acknowledged as the dominant literary force of the decade.
Their novels and plays typically feature a rootless, lower-middle or working-class male protagonist who views society with scorn and sardonic humour and may have conflicts with authority but who is nevertheless preoccupied with the quest for upward mobility.
Among the other writers embraced in the term are the novelists John Braine (Room at the Top, 1957) and Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958) and the playwrights Bernard Kops (The Hamlet of Stepney Green, 1956) and Arnold Wesker (Chicken Soup with Barley, 1958). Like that of the Beat movement in the United States, the impetus of the Angry Young Men was exhausted in the early 1960s.
The “angry young men” is a title applied to a group of mostly working and middle class playwrights and novelists who expressed discontent with the organization of society. The media characterized these men as those disillusioned with traditional British society. These novels and plays featured working class heroes and were successful in changing the genre.
Playwrights
The name for this group came from playwright John Osborne’s play, Look Back in Anger(1956). This play examines a marriage between a working class man, Jimmy, and his middle class wife, Alison. Their differences in class make it difficult for them to get along and when Alison becomes pregnant, their marriage falls apart. Another playwright who is considered part of this group is Arnold Wesker, whose kitchen sink drama, Roots (1959) addressed social concerns of the time. Kitchen sink dramas typically depicted the living conditions of working class Britons. They would often show cramped apartments, poor neighborhoods, and the political and social issues of the working class. This was a turn away from the “well-made” plays of the previous generation. Roots tells the story of Beatie Bryant, an uneducated working-class woman obsessed with her boyfriend. When he leaves her, she transitions into a woman who can express herself and her working-class struggles.
Novelists
Many novelists were also categorized as part of the “angry young men” group.Kingsley Amis often wrote novels that acted as social criticism. He is considered one of the leaders of the “angry young men” group. His first novel, Lucky Jim(1954), is probably his most famous and follows the character Jim Dixon as he becomes a lecturer at a prestigious university. Another writer who focused on the economic conditions of Great Britain is John Braine. His novel Room at the Top(1957) is about an ambitious young man named Joe Lampton, who uses seduction and lies to overcome his socioeconomic struggles. It is set in post-war Britain, as many novels written during this time were.
Other British Drama
Aside from the “angry young men,” there were several playwrights finding success in post-war Britain. During this period it became more difficult to find funding for plays and only certain commercial successes were performed.
Harold Pinter, who is sometimes added to the list of “angry young men,” found success with several plays including The Birthday Party (1958), Tom Stoppard(1937), and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966). The latter of these plays is an absurdist comedy that expanded on minor characters from the Shakespearean play, Hamlet. The absurdist genre during this time focused largely on existentialism and the meaning of human existence. Existentialism is a philosophical theory that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as responsible for determining his or her own fate through acts of free will. Samuel Beckett was one of the most significant playwrights post-World War II and had a lot of influence on writers like Pinter. His play Waiting for Godot (1955) is about two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who spend the entirety of the play waiting for someone named Godot to arrive. Gradually the two men realize it is unlikely that Godot will arrive and resolve to commit suicide, but the two men are unable to follow through with this.
Radio Drama
During the 1950s and 60s, many British playwrights began their careers by writing plays made for radio. Caryl Churchill started her career with radio broadcasts. Churchill often wrote about the abuses of power. Her most famous play, Cloud Nine (1979), satirizes British colonization and explores controversial topics of feminism and homosexuality. Churchill was well known for writing about sexual politics and feminist themes.
The Novelists
British writers from the Modernist period like Dylan Thomas, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and W.H. Auden (see Modernist introduction) continued to write well beyond World War II, but a new generation of writers would soon take their place.
George Orwell’s novels were largely political and reflected his opposition to totalitarianism and support of democratic socialism. His novel Animal Farm (1945) is anallegorical novel and uses animals as the metaphor for the Stalin era of Soviet Russia. The novel follows the rebellion of animals against man. After two pigs take control, one pig, Napoleon, abuses his power. He begins practicing human-like behavior and abolishes the equality for which the animals worked. Orwell’s second well-known novel is Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which is set in a world of perpetual war and constant government surveillance. The ruling party is called Big Brother and manipulates news and history to support the party. The novel’s protagonist is Winston Smith, a worker for Big Brother who assists in forging documents, but secretly hates the party. His attempts at fighting against Big Brother end in failure as he realizes the full extent of the party’s reach.
Two other novels that attained notoriety during the time are Lord of the Flies (1954) and A Clockwork Orange (1962). William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is about a group of boys stuck on an uninhabited island. The boys try to create a government among themselves, but this leads to disastrous consequences when a power struggle ensues, two boys are killed, and many others begin acting animalistic. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian novel. Dystopian novels typically portray an alternate world to that of the author. They are usually political and social commentaries and focus on oppression and corruption. Burgess’s novel is set in the near future where youth violence has become popular. The teen protagonist, Alex, narrates his violent actions and his run-ins with state authorities. While in prison he undergoes psychotherapy that creates an aversion to violence, but this violates his free will and makes him severely depressed.
Magical Realism
One of the strongest influences of 1980’s fiction was the embracing of magical realism, the concept in literature of accepting magic as a normal part of everyday life. Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) was an example of this. The novel focuses on the life of Sophie Fevvers, a girl who claims to have been hatched from an egg and who says she has wings. As she continues to tell her story, it becomes more obvious that her narrative is a lie. Another example of magical realism is Salman Rushdie’sMidnight’s Children (1981), a novel that follows India’s transition into an independent country. It is told through the perspective of Saleem Sinai, who has supernatural powers.
Post-Colonialism
Embracing some of the values from the Modernist period, there were several non-English writers that were part of the British Postmodernist period. Most of these writers came from previously colonized British territories and their writing reflected this colonization. Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (1958) is set in the 1890’s and highlights the struggle for some Africans to assimilate to the traditions of white colonists. Jean Rhys was born in the British West Indies and her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) also critically looks at the colonization of natives. Her novel was intended to be a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre, and tells Bertha Mason’s side of the story.
A campus novel, also known as an academic novel, is a novel whose main action is set in and around the campus of auniversity. The genre in its current form dates back to the early 1950s. The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy, published in 1952, is often quoted as the earliest example, although in Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, Elaine Showalter discusses C. P. Snow's The Masters, of the previous year, and several earlier novels have an academic setting and the same characteristics, such as Willa Cather's The Professor's House of 1925, Régis Messac'sSmith Conundrum first published between 1928 and 1931 and Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night of 1935 (see below).
Many well-known campus novels, such as Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim and those of David Lodge, are comic or satirical, often counterpointing intellectual pretensions and human weaknesses. Some, however, attempt a serious treatment of university life; examples include C. P. Snow's The Masters, J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Philip Roth's The Human Stain, and Norene Moskalski's Nocturne, Opus 1: Sea Foam. The novels are usually told from the viewpoint of a faculty member (e.g., Lucky Jim) or the viewpoint of a student (e.g., Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons). Novels such as Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited that focus on students rather than faculty are often considered to belong to a distinct genre, sometimes termedvarsity novels.
A subgenre is the campus murder mystery, where the closed university setting substitutes for the country house ofGolden Age detective novels; examples include Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen mysteries,Carolyn Gold Heilbrun's Kate Fansler mysteries and Colin Dexter's The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn.
The British New Wave is a style of films released in Great Britain between 1959 and 1963. The label is a translation ofNouvelle Vague, the French term first applied to the films of François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard among others.
The British New Wave was characterised by many of the same stylistic and thematic conventions as the French New Wave. Usually in black and white, these films had a spontaneous quality, often shot in a pseudo-documentary (or cinéma vérité) style on real locations and with real people rather than extras, apparently capturing life as it happens.
There is considerable overlap between the New Wave and the angry young men, those artists in British theatre and film such as playwright John Osborne and director Tony Richardson, who challenged the social status quo. Their work drew attention to the reality of life for the working classes, especially in the North of England, often characterised as "It's grim up north". This particular type of drama, centred on class and the nitty-gritty of day-to-day life, was also known as kitchen sink realism.
Like the French New Wave, where many of the filmmakers began as film critics and journalists, in Britain critical writing about the state of British cinema began in the 1950s and foreshadowed some of what was to come. Among this group of critic/documentary film makers was Lindsay Anderson who was a prominent critic writing for the influential Sequencemagazine (1947–52), which he co-founded with Gavin Lambert and Karel Reisz (later a prominent director); writing for theBritish Film Institute's journal Sight and Sound and the left-wing political weekly the New Statesman. In one of his early and most well-known polemical pieces, Stand Up, Stand Up, he outlined his theories of what British cinema should become.
Following a series of screenings which he organised at the National Film Theatre of independently produced short films including his own Every Day Except Christmas (about the Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market), Karel Reisz's Momma Don't Allow and others, he developed a philosophy of cinema which found expression in what became known as the Free Cinema Movement in Britain by the late 1950s. This was the belief that the cinema must break away from its class-bound attitudes and that the working classes ought to be seen on Britain's screens.
Along with Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and others he secured funding from a variety of sources (including Ford of Britain) and they each made a series of socially challenging short documentaries on a variety of subjects.
These films, made in the tradition of British documentaries in the 1930s by such men as John Grierson, foreshadowed much of the social realism of British cinema which emerged in the 1960s with Anderson's own film This Sporting Life, Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
By 1964, the cycle was essentially over. Tony Richardson's Tom Jones, Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night and the earlyJames Bond films ushered in a new era for British cinema, now suddenly popular in the United States.